Senator McCain, predictably enough, began carping about "scandal" and Watergate. On Fox News Sunday, he said "Senator Obama raised $150 million… completely breaking whatever idea we had after Watergate to keep the costs and spending on campaigns under control… And I can tell you this, that has unleashed now in presidential campaigns a new flood of spending that will then cause a scandal, and then we will fix it again."

To read why Senator McCain has a point, just not the point he thinks, click on the headline above.

The Washington Times has an interesting editorial today, discussing how McCain-Feingold is impacting the campaign of Senator McCain. A few choice excerpts:

The workings of McCain-Feingold and the Democratic Party’s huge fund-raising advantage have left Mr. McCain debilitatingly dependent on the $85 million in taxpayer financing he received last month. The Politico newspaper reported yesterday that Mr. Obama is outspending the combined McCain campaign/Republican National Committee campaign effort by as much as 8-1, and that probably understates Mr. McCain’s disadvantage.

In the first three weeks of September, Mr. Obama ran 1,342 television commercials in the Washington media market, which includes Northern Virginia, a hotly contested area of a battleground state. By comparison, Mr. McCain ran just eight – an advantage of more than 160-1 in Mr. Obama’s favor. Unsurprisingly, Mr. McCain now finds himself in the embarrassing position of searching for loopholes that would enable him to circumvent the very legislative Frankenstein he created…

…Mr. McCain has apparently developed a very different perspective on the bill he touts as one of his greatest legislative achievements. Reporter Jim McElhatton of The Washington Times wrote in May about the fact that Mr. McCain was appearing at fundraisers across the United States where donors could legally donate up to $70,000 each to help him win the presidency through a group set up jointly by his campaign and the Republican Party.

The editorial gets a few things wrong, such as insinuating that it was McCain-Feingold that first imposed contribution limits (that happened back when disco ruled and the Oakland Raiders were actually good) or making the plainly-wrong statement that the Supreme Court ruled against Wisconsin Right to Life in 2007. But the editorials larger point is sound: Senator McCain has sown "reform" and "anti-corruption" sentiment for the past decade and a half, and is now reaping the result – a campaign hobbled by insufficient funding, limited in its ability to compete with an opponent with a far more sensible perspective on fundraising (at least in practice).

Last week, I had the privilege and pleasure of moderating a Federalist Society panel that examined the topic of "Election Finance and 527s," which is particularly relevant right now less than a month before the 2008 presidential and congressional elections. Specifically, the discussion centered on the "constitutional, statutory, and regulatory questions about the free speech rights of non-profit or tax-exempt groups," and included panelists from both sides of the partisan and ideological aisle. Nevertheless, in introducing the topic and the panel, I noted that perhaps everyone on the panel would agree that this election cycle had seen a lot fewer television advertisements run by independent groups than four years earlier.

Everyone remembers the advertising and mobilization undertaken by groups like the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, Progress for America, Americans Coming Together, MoveOn.org, and the Media Fund during the 2004 presidential cycle. But try to name an independent group that has so saturated the airwaves and blanketed the country this time around, and I bet you can’t name such a group for 2008. Quite frankly, with less than three weeks to go before Election Day, there are plenty of political ads, but nearly all of them — at least those I have been hearing and seeing in the battleground state of Virginia — are being cut, placed, and run by the candidates and their political parties.

So I’m doing research on silly claims made by "clean elections" advocates, and go to the Web site of Arizona’s Clean Elections Institute. Right there on the homepage, directly under the statement that "clean elections" mean "Less money from special interests!" is an ad relating to some ballot proposition in Arizona paid for by "The Voters of Arizona – No on Prop 105."

Who are these "Voters of Arizona," you might ask? The group helpfully identifies their major donors as: "Arizona Hospital and Healthcare Association, Professional Fire Fighters of Arizona, Arizona Chapter Associated General Contractors of America Inc., and the National Education Association (an out-of-state contributor with 34,227 members in Arizona)."

Too bad we don’t have a category for blog posts called "Some people just can’t be pleased." If we did, I suspect the folks at Public Citizen would be regularly featured there.

By this point, everyone spends more than 3 seconds a day following campaign finance issues and politics understands that Senator Barack Obama is raising lots and lots of money. I sometimes wonder if the Obama campaign has had to build their own Money Bin, a la Scrooge McDuck.

So what’s the problem? Well, nothing for those of us who expect Senator Obama (and Senator McCain, and any other candidate with money in the bank and a message to communicate to voters) to spend his time going around the country explaining why he’s the best choice to be our next president, and expects his campaign staff to do the same.

For those with… different… expectations for candidates, however, there is some disappointment that Senator Obama’s campaign isn’t dedicating time to satisfy their curiosity about what is going on at fundraising events. So Lynn Sweet of the Sun-Times worries that the committee’s "fund-raising activities have been done out of sight," while Public Citizen’s Chris Holman (I’m pretty sure that’s supposed to be Craig Holman) is concerned that while the Obama campaign has touted transparency as a virtue, "they should not shy away from telling the public what they are doing."

Apparently, full disclosure of donors isn’t enough to satisfy the "reform" community, they also need to be reassured that the campaign isn’t – well, I don’t know what exactly they think might be going on at these fundraising events. Perhaps Senator Obama leads the guests in belting out "It’s Rainin Money" sung to the tune of that old Gloria Gaynor classic?

I’m pretty sure the Obama campaign has better things to do with their time than keep Lynn Sweet and Chris (Craig?) Holman apprised of what goes on at their fundraising events. Lots of campaign activities take place behind closed doors – strategy and tactics meetings, policy discussions, reviewing polls, debate prep, etc. – and it’s absurd to demand that campaigns not have private events, fundraising or otherwise.

I’m a lot less interested in what goes on at these fundraising events filled with citizens who want to see their favored candidate elected, and a lot more interested in what the candidate proposes to do about issues I’m concerned with. The paranoid "reform" community apparently feels otherwise.

In this policy briefing, John Samples analyzes the shortcomings of the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact (NPV), which, if enacted by states possessing a combined total of 270 electoral votes, would result in the direct election of the president of the United States, essentially nullifying the Electoral College. As of September 2011, the NPV Compact has been passed by the legislatures of 9 different states, totaling 132 electoral votes, or 49% of the electoral votes needed to activate it. Among a broad swath of issues, Samples examines how the NPV Compact diminishes federalism, broadens electoral disputes by nationalizing them, and fails to provide any security against states withdrawing from the Compact at any time. Above all, the policy briefing argues that states that candidates disregard now will continue to be disregarded under the NPV Compact. As such, Samples urges states not to join onto the agreement.

Although Judge Silver acknowledged that the "matching fund" were unconstitutional, she held off on preventing the program from moving forward with dispensing the additional money to candidates participating in the program. Instead, she asked attorneys for both sides to prepare arguments over whether the First Amendment rights damaged by the program were sufficient to change the rules this close to the election (presumably the matching funds are history either way after this election).

Reading this article reporting on yesterday’s hearing, I had to chuckle over the assertions of the attorney defending the "clean elections" program and why the "matching funds" should be distributed despite the fact that they are unconstitutional:

Brad Phillips, a California-based attorney representing the Clean Elections Institute, said revoking publicly funded candidates’ ability to collect matching funds would unfairly punish them for using the system and hold them accountable for unseen risks that the provision could be swept away in the middle of a campaign.

"In good faith, they relied on the act as well as the matching funds," said Phillips, adding that the candidates would be ill-prepared to respond to last-minute advertisements from their opponents.

Click on the headline above to see just how "unforseen" the risks were.

Earlier this week CCP received a request from a student at Trinity University who is writing a research paper on campaign finance regulation. I thought I’d share with you one of her questions, and my response.

Q: What sort of campaign finance reforms would take into account individual rights to freedom of political expression while also protecting the general public from possible corruption?

A:There is no real "protection" from possible corruption available through campaign finance "reform," because there is very little corruption that goes through the campaign finance system. The $90,000 found in William Jefferson’s refrigerator and the "menu" of bribes that Randy "Duke" Cunningham created, just to mention two more recent and notorious examples of public corruption, had nothing to do with campaign contributions, and in fact suggest that campaign contributions aren’t sufficient to get Members of Congress to engage in unethical behavior (otherwise, they wouldn’t have had to have been bribed). The alternative would be to suggest that Jefferson and Cunningham are/were among the least corrupt Members of Congress, because their colleagues are corrupted by far less amounts of money that can only be used for a limited purpose, their campaigns. Few would agree with this latter explanation, I suspect.

The best reforms would acknowledge that money is vital to political speech (just as it is vital to the press and houses of worship, as we’d quickly see if we made it illegal to spend more than $2,300 in advertising with a single newspaper or to contribute more than $2,300 to a church), and recognize that campaign contributions don’t pose the threat of corruption that is popularly thought. Unlimited contributions, with disclosure for truly large donations to elected officials, would be the best way to go, along with a voting public that is vigilant and pays attention to what their elected officials are doing and how they are spending taxpayer dollars. Absent a public unwilling to put up with corruption, there is no reform, either along the "McCain-Feingold" lines or what we at CCP would prefer, that is going to address corruption in government.

CCP chairman Bradley A. Smith will be participating on a panel titled "Election Finance and 527s" today at 10:30 a.m. as part of the Federalist Society’s Election Law Conference.

Smith will be joined by Mr. Joseph M. Birkenstock of Caplin Drysdale, Mr. James Bopp of Bopp, Coleson & Bostrom, and Mr. Scott E. Thomas of Dickstein Shapiro.

According to the Federalist Society, "This panel will consider the laws and regulations that limit or restrict giving, receiving, and/or spending related to an election, as well as the constitutional requirements and boundaries for such rules. Thus, the panel will consider the topics that generally fall under the umbrella of campaign finance, most notably the continued fight over who can contribute and/or expend what money on political advertising."